pretty lofty goal: 400km orbit, 5 people.i'd say 50mil will not be enough to cover even a tenth of the cost of such an endeavor.

50 Million isn't enough.. but they also offer 2 contracts with a total value of 1 billion us$... + they can also sell their vehicles to other companies.

In addition to the $50 million prize, Bigelow said his company also is prepared to offer $200 million in conditional purchase agreements for six flights of a selected vehicle. “It could be somebody who doesn’t win, who comes in late, but we like their architecture better than the winner’s architecture,” Bigelow said.

In addition, $800 million in options contracts for 24 flights will be available over a period of about four to 4.5 years, Bigelow said.

“So we have a $1 billion dollar program between conditional contracts and the options,” Bigelow said. There are only two conditions attached to the purchase agreement. One is if the U.S. government imposes legal restrictions that prevent launching privately financed orbital spacecraft.

The argument that the prize wouldn't cover the investment costs of the private orbital vehicle is valid for the suborbital case too - the XPRIZE counting 10,000,000 $ didn't cover the investment costs of Wight Knight/SpaceShipOne counting more than 20,000,000 $. That's twice the prize - and that may be so too in the case of an orbital vehicle: 100,000,000 $.

But as I posted under "Financial Barries - the revenues Branson would get if he real will get 200,000 $ from all the 7,000 customers reported recently sum up to 1.4 billion $. From this have to be subtracted the investment costs of five five-passenger-SSO-versions. These investment costs can be estimated rawly as follows:

1. From the total investment costs of SSO of over 20,000,000 have to be subtracted the R&D costs first: the engines used for the test flights, the costs of construction and building WK/SSO as far as they are caused by the unpreventable lack of experience given by nature, the costs of the waste of material caused by unpreventable errors to be removed by R&D, the costs of test flights and the administrations costs of R&D - at least. I suppose this to be the main portion of the over 20,000,000.

2. What's left then are the normal production costs of SSO. SSO is a single unit of product - Branson has ordered five units of a product. So there will be a degression of fixed costs. The will be a significant amount of fixed costs included in the production costs of SSO. Additionaly it's possible that the increased amount of units of product will cause economies of scale.

3. To the result will have to be added the costs of increased volume - but this increase of investment costs will be less than proportional to the increase of volume - i.e. economies of scale.

So the 1.4 billion $ revenues will include a large portion of raw profit. From this will have to be subtracted Bransons launch costs.

Result: It's possible that Branson will get a profit of much more than 100 million $ if he sells 7,000 tickets at a price of 200,000 $.

From this it can be expected that a private orbital vehicle like that required by the Americas Space Prize can be financed if there is a good choice of strategy, controlling and management..

Provided Scaled and Branson can build all 5 SpaceShip2, start to run the business to get the money coming in, design and build a orbital spacecraft under 5 years.

Your maths is essentially correct. But it will take some time to pan out.

Time is the biggest obstacle for the America Space Prize. The team that could win this prize is a team that has the money from the beginning so they could avoid the fund raising cycle and go straight into vehicle development. And it is still a big could.

Concerning my raw estimate of financial ressources I have to add something:

1. According to an article under www.xprizenews.org Scaled's innovative feather-technique is going to be used in RASCAL. Possibly Scaled get revenues by licensing their innovation.

2. Scaled is involved in t/Space and this way working on the CEV - which will be an orbital craft.

By these project they can get experiences and insights without needing their own funds. They get their R&D costs covered another way. And they can save time this way because by t/Space they are working together with several other teams and companies.

They get the advantage of synergies and the t/Space-involvement can accelerate work on an orbital vehicle designed for the ASP competition.

koxinga, this post isn't an answer to your post, but Scaled's strategy can prove to be a significant help and assistance to get ready an orbital vehicle within five years.

Concerning my raw estimate of 2. Scaled is involved in t/Space and this way working on the CEV - which will be an orbital craft.

I knew Rutan was a member of the board started by NASA for studies into the future of manned space exploration, but I don't think scaled has the capabilities (yet) to actually develop an orbital craft.

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